


the edge of the world

by lesbiangreyjoy



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Castle Black, F/M, Jon Snow is Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, Sansa Stark is Queen in the North, for chlod
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbiangreyjoy/pseuds/lesbiangreyjoy
Summary: happy birthday chloe <3
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 49





	the edge of the world

The night was black when Sansa woke. It was sudden – her eyes flicked open of their own accord, her hands freed themselves from tangled sheets to rest atop her bed furs in the cool draught – but whatever dream had shaken her from sleep was quickly fading. Ice, stone, the bark of a dog – they hovered beneath her eyelids, and then they were gone. There was only the unfamiliar chamber she found herself alert in: bare stone walls, old rushes upon the floor, a sharp chill in the air. _Winterfell is not so cold as this_ , Sansa thought _._ A few breaths, visible before her nose in pale clouds, and she remembered she was in Castle Black.

Winter was waning, and the lordlings and knights of Sansa's Northern court had begun to murmur hopefully that the white ravens may fly within a year to herald spring, but the snows had held stubbornly as yet. Across the North, food stocks were growing thin - and no more so than beyond the Gift, where the Night's Watch slowly recovered its strength and rebuilt its Wall, under twice Lord Commander, Jon Snow.

It was not the first time that Sansa's bannermen had come together to send supplies and recruits up to the healing brotherhood; it was not the first time that the Queen in the North had insisted she accompany the baggage train.

 _The journey will be hard, Your Grace,_ her lords had said.

 _That does not bother me,_ Sansa had replied.

 _Jon Snow is an exile, my queen_ , they had told her.

 _He is my family_ , Sansa had said.

The iron circlet atop her head, wrought in two shining wolves, quickly quelled any argument. Her bannermen had gathered that aid they had promised, meat and grain and more mouths to eat it, and the caravan had departed from Winterfell with the queen at its head.

It was not the first time Sansa had come, and she was straight-backed and clear-voiced when the gates of Castle Black opened to admit her. A new-made knight, anxious to please, helped her from her horse; the Lord Commander, standing before his glittering Wall in greeting, looked as though he might dart forward to seize the task himself. Sansa met his eye and almost smiled. Jon's brow was creased, Sansa had noted, and his eyes were beginning to crinkle at the corners. He was waiting for her to speak. _Let him wait_.

Sansa had glanced around herself at the yard. The snow had begun to fall again, just lightly, and a fresh dust covered the keeps and furnishings of the black brothers’ holdfast. Nor were the brothers themselves spared – old or young, their hair was flecked with white, and their black furs crusted with white. A few bent into clumsy bows as the Queen in the North roamed her eyes across them.

Sansa had turned her gaze back on Jon, framed against the mass of glittering ice he had sworn himself to once more. "Lord Commander," she said, her politesse thick and teasing.

"Your Grace," answered Jon. He exhaled and lifted his chin, looking Sansa over from head to heel. Sansa wondered momentarily what he saw – could she have changed, in the few moon-turns since she had last come to the Wall? Or was Jon looking for something else? "Welcome to Castle Black," he finished.

“Perhaps we should get out of the snow,” Sansa suggested.

“Aye, perhaps we should.”

Sansa had fallen into step beside him as they crossed the yard, clasping her gloved hands before herself, listening absently to the crisp, cold harmony of two pairs of boots upon one of the last snows of winter. She did not have to glance at Jon to know his face was solemn. That was the dance of courtesy. A year had passed since Jon had returned to the Wall, since Sansa had taken the throne of the North, and each time she travelled to see him, the dance was the same. “Your Grace” met with “my lord”; the awkward awe of his new recruits, the proud honour of her knightly retinue. Sansa could not have said why they fell into the dance in the first place, upon her first visit to the Wall – out of Jon’s respect for her crown, perhaps, or Sansa’s keen sense for all the eyes fixed upon them – but she was loath to abandon it. The cooler the greeting, Sansa thought, the warmer the private reunion.

They had supped in a private room, and discussed all that which had to be discussed: the supplies, Jon's command, Sansa's reign. Then, Sansa had been given her chambers and bid goodnight. The room was warm – a hearth hummed in a corner, and candlelight licked the thin, wry hangings of the walls – but it was empty. On impulse, Sansa had delayed Jon's exit. “Which tower is this?” she had enquired, before Jon closed the door after himself, though she knew the answer well enough.

Jon had paused, one gloved hand hovering above the door handle. “The King’s Tower,” he said. Sansa held his gaze. Finally, the corner of his mouth turned upward. “I suppose we’ll have to rename it, now.”

Sansa had been on him in two steps, flinging herself onto Jon and wrapping her arms around him, heedless of the thick fur and boiled leather in her path. Leaning back to catch her, Jon’s arms found her waist and tightened around her close enough that Sansa thought her ribs might crack, if not for her own armoured gown. Jon half-buried his face in her hair; Sansa squeezed her eyes closed and turned her own face in to his neck. She inhaled the scent of him – woodsmoke and worn fur and leather and Jon.

After a forever, after no time at all, Jon's hold on her had slackened, and Sansa took her cue to step backwards away from him. "Goodnight," Jon had said, softly.

"Goodnight," Sansa had breathed.

Then he had been gone, and Sansa had stripped herself of her gown to crawl beneath her bed furs and fall into her cold sleep of shifting visions. And now she had woken, and perhaps it was the chill in her bedchamber with its dead brazier, or perhaps it was the moonlight filtering through her little window, or perhaps it was because somehow, somehow, her pillow smelled of _woodsmoke and worn fur and leather and Jon_ , Sansa rose from her bed. Yesterday's discarded clothes lay folded across a black-cushioned bench, but the dress was an intricate one, and in the darkness seemed too much fuss for her purpose. Instead, Sansa dressed in a soft, embroidered gown of dark grey wool, wrapped herself in her heavy cloak, and left the tower.

The yard was near deserted. The night leeched what little colour Castle Black normally had from it, turning it to blues and greys and blacks. Sansa pulled her cloak closer about herself and tilted her chin up to gaze on the looming, oppressive Wall. In the dark, much like in the daylight, Sansa could not see to the top. 

At its foot, two sworn brothers huddled by a brazier before the winch. They straightened abruptly, awkward and deferential, as Sansa approached them in her short, shivering steps. "Is the Lord Commander on the Wall?" she asked. It was a shot in the dark – Sansa did not know the hour, but that it was late in the night, and Jon may well have long since retired to his own chambers. But her luck was good that night; the two sworn brothers nodded in unison.

"Aye, milady. Your Grace," the shorter one said. 

Sansa waited, politely. Quickly, the taller one moved to handle the lever and enable her ascent; Sansa gave him a small smile and a nod, and entered the iron cage.

Atop the Wall, jutting seven hundred feet into the night sky, the wind blew with an even fiercer cold. Jon was not difficult to find. A left turn after moving from the winch cage, and then a right, and Sansa found him standing at the edge of the Wall, at the edge of the world, looking over the wintry wilderness of the lands beyond the Wall with his back to her. There was no barrier between him and the thin air in front; the toes of his boots seemed to encroach on that oblivion, to dare gravity to take him. _You're too close to the edge,_ Sansa wanted to call to him. But there was no tremble in Jon's posture, nor did he spare a glance down to the sheer drop below himself. He was still as if he had been carved from the same ice as the Wall he watched, draped in black fur shivering in the breeze, gazing only straight ahead to the thick, dark forest, and whatever lay beyond that.

Sansa tried to keep still and silent and watch him, to preserve some image of him like this – perfect and solemn, straight-backed and unmoving, looking for the first time in memory like he belonged to the ground he stood upon – but perhaps some grit crunched beneath her boot, or perhaps the wool of her dress whispered upon itself, and Jon's shoulders tensed. Mercifully stepping away from the precipice, he turned to see her.

"Sansa," he said, then quickly, "Your Grace."

"Do you have a companion, up here?" Sansa asked softly.

"No."

"Then don't call me _Your Grace_ ," she smiled, and moved to join him by the brazier he had at his post as some small defence against the chill. There was some little twitch at the corner of his mouth, so minor that Sansa thought she imagined it, before, as if remembering _yes, they were alone_ , Jon's face split into a smile. He glanced down at the coals burning low in the brazier, then returned his gaze to Sansa.

"Sansa," he said, the brazier light flickering orange and yellow across his cheeks. "What are you doing on top of the Wall in the middle of the night?"

"I woke." _And I wanted to see you._ "And I wanted to see it." She turned her head, giving a gentle nod towards the edge of the Wall, the edge of the world. The forest, and the snow, and the cold, and the dark. Jon's exile; Jon's home.

He nodded, and fell into a silence with her. Sansa might have been comfortable with it – she did not need words from Jon for his presence to be a comfort to her – but the cold of Castle Black had settled in quickly, and already her noble retinue would be grumbling about lingering at the Wall _no longer than another day_ , and then how long until she saw Jon next? Summer may break before they were next reunited. Until then, Jon would remain at Castle Black, surrounded by his duty and his black brethren and the aching cold, and Sansa would remain at Winterfell, shielded by warm walls and thick gowns, and calcified in _aloneness_.

"Jon," she began, slow and low, her eyes cast down upon the brazier. "It has been a year."

A year since King's Landing, a year since Daenerys Targaryen, a year since Sansa's coronation, a year since Jon's exile.

Sansa lifted her eyes to Jon's face, lit warmly from below, his dark hair full lips and heavy furrowed brow. She had seen him no more than four times that year, insisting upon escorting the supply donation. She had borne it passively, had busied herself with the formative first year of her reign, had brought lady companions into her employ and promised herself Arya's return before very long – but all of a sudden, thinking of _woodsmoke and worn fur and leather and Jon_ , it was not enough.

"I am queen," she said simply. "If I pardoned you–"

"No," Jon said. Sansa watched him. His response had been quick and abrupt, but not uncertain. _He has thought about this._ How could he not? If Sansa felt alone with her lords and ladies and knights and horses, then Jon could not be safe from the ache with his brothers and ice. Two hundred leagues separated Castle Black from Winterfell; two hundred leagues would solve the ache. But _no_ , he had said.

Sansa opened her mouth to press her argument. Jon saw it, and spoke first. "I took my vows a second time. I swore myself to the Watch. My duty is to the Watch." He paused, glanced at the edge of the Wall, the edge of the world. "The dead are gone," he said, "but the free folk survived. They're a different people. They still have their raiders and rapers. The Watch still needs men, and I'm still one of them."

Sansa held her gaze on Jon, and did not press her point further. Instead, she followed Jon's eyes towards the edge of the Wall, roaming her eyes across the thick, dark carpet of trees, that frozen wild that Jon looked upon with something like desire. 

"You took your vows a second time," Sansa echoed. "But you didn't have to. Some of them love you – the wildlings. You might have been a king yourself, out there beyond the Wall."

When she looked back at Jon, his eyes were already on her, his brow creased upwards, his mouth almost, _almost_ smiling. "I've been a king," he said, quietly, teasing. He turned the corners of his mouth down. "It didn't suit me."

For all the gentleness and humour in his tone, he was unmoving. Rejoining the Watch, Sansa realised, had been Jon's intention from the moment he left King's Landing, and he would hold fast to his place here – through the dregs of winter, when Castle Black became reliant upon Sansa's gifted supplies; through the depths of summer, when green returned to the North and the Wall began to weep.

And Sansa would sit in Winterfell, grant audience to her subjects, sew and gossip with her ladies, and wait for the next reason to visit Castle Black.

Perhaps Jon read her thoughts upon her face as Sansa watched the smouldering coals of the brazier. His voice was lower, softer, when he spoke again. "You're right," he said. "You're the queen." He clasped a gloved hand over his wrist and moved around the brazier, a little closer to her. "The queen can go where she likes, can't she? To guest in whichever castle – or to see the Wall, if it please her. And the supplies – the Lord Commander is the Lord Commander, but I don't see a reason he couldn't give command to another for a time, to seek proper audience with the queen whose help he asks."

Sansa breathed out. Jon would not abandon the Wall – but he was not a slave, and he could visit her as easily as she could come to him. Memories of Uncle Benjen, and the black brothers who roamed the south, seeking recruits – the Wall was not a prison, however it was treated, and though Jon lived in supposed exile, under Sansa's hospitality he would be forever safe.

He was close to her now. Above the cold sharpness of the air, and the burning coals, Sansa could smell _woodsmoke and worn fur and leather and Jon_. "Yes," she answered, finally. "He ought to do that."

And then Jon's dark glove was cupping Sansa's cheek, shielding it from the wind as it tilted her face upwards, and Jon's lips were pressed to hers, soft despite the bracing wind, warm despite the seeping cold. His kiss tasted of promise – _aloneness is an ache_ , it pressed into Sansa's mouth, _but there is a cure._ Sansa lifted her hands to grip his cloak and hold him to herself, thinking of all the reasons she could invent to summon Jon to her court, of the sudden love of Castle Black she would proclaim to her ladies so she might return to the Wall quickly. Some small voice in Sansa's mind warned her that they were on the edge of the Wall, on the edge of the world, but then Jon wrapped his arms around her waist, and became everything.


End file.
